Process 5/7

Early Testing

I tested a lo-fi prototype with six people, which revealed some labeling issues I iterated right away before proceeding with the other five.

 

The tests revealed that users understood the basic app functions, but the iconography needed refinement. The graphical wellness indicator, the sun, was easily associated with the plants’ health, but its dual purpose as a status indicator and a place to view notifications was a little sticky, a problem I didn’t figure out until later, as was also true of the gallery problem, which didn’t manifest itself at all at this stage.

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My lo-fi wireframes were similar in structure to my sketches. I built the style guide and hi-fi frames, the tested next with a Figma prototype.

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Process 6/7

Hi-fi Testing

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Testing with actual real life human beings is one of the pillars of the UX design process.

 

So here I sit thinking of how to ‘fess up to testing my prototype with only 3 users the first round, and 2 in the second, instead of the magic number of 5 for each round. At this juncture, please forgive me a lengthy Steve Krug quotation:

 

Steve Krug—

“You don’t need to find all the problems. In fact, you’ll never find all of the problems in anything you test. And it wouldn’t help if you did, because of this fact: You can find more problems in half a day than you can fix in a month. You’ll always find more problems than you have the resources to fix, so it’s very important that you focus on fixing the most serious ones first. And three users are very likely to encounter many of the most significant problems related to the tasks that you’re testing.” 

 

I found this to be true. 

 

Testing is a fun and challenging enterprise. It can be tricky to describe the scenario of what the user is trying to use the app for without asking any leading questions, revealing the intention if things get sticky only at the end of a scenario. You don’t want to make your tester seem foolish if they can’t read your mind, so you may have to step in and apologize for your dumb design.  

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Process 7/7

Iterations Undertaken

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1. Dashboard:

A dashboard was added that is accessed from a button on the home screen. This allows the user to see all the plants and all their upcoming tasks as well. Besides the dashboard, plants can be scrolled through by swiping up and down. (This is a little clunky in the Figma prototype.) Plant history photos can be seen by swiping to the left back to the beginning. 

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2. Status indicator & notifications restructured:

Users saw that the sun showed notifications, but did not easily perceive the affordance of updating the status. The sun button was simplified on the homescreen from the slider to a stationary button that opens up the list of tasks to complete. Upon opening that list, he sees a button to update the status, which opens the slider. This led to much better flow in the testing than the original design. 

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3. Gallery space and photo swiping redefined

I had originally imagined swiping side to side would navigate among a user’s different plants. Users were confused about what gesture would navigate to their other plants versus other photos of the currently featured plant. It worked much better to use a familiar pattern found in apps like Instagram: swipe up and down to go to different “posts” and side to side to explore the content of each post.

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Reflections: What I learned

1. Summary

Throughout the case study, I tried to work in lessons learned as I went along. Let me list some here as a recap.

• Wrestling with ambition and scope of project

• Prioritizing research insights and committing to one direction

• Sketching it all out low-resolution, building up detail

• Testing: non-leading questions, observe behavior, communicate joy

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2. Project Limitations

A live product tested over time with real users would be necessary to fully test my design choices for their impact on actual plants growing better, and user enjoyment and satisfaction. Also, as mentioned above, business objectives were not considered. My only insight into the business aspect came in competitor research where I saw the different subscription models, and researched the investment behind some of the technology—the AI that identifies plant species, for instance. I can’t wait to work on a product that will actually have a launch date, follow up on how the product is doing in the market, and research and plan improvements.

 

3. Looking to the future

As my first foray into UX territory, the main lesson is of course that I have a lot to learn. Better research, defining of the problems, ideating, building, testing. It’s easy to imagine why people would end up specializing. One could spend a full career becoming expert at any given facet of the process. Which area I might end up specializing in, I do not know. Interviewing and research and its direct contact with humanity is inherently more interesting to me than things closer to the engineering side of the spectrum. Let’s see what the future brings. 

 

Thank you! If you’ve made it to this final line, thank you very much for your time and attention to this humble project.